11 ms·

If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail serv

by ta20240528 11mo ago

If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools. They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.

throwawaysleep 11mo ago
Push has come to shove and has been shoving for nearly a decade. Europeans continue to be incapable. As a Canadian I wish they were not, but they are.
- vladms 11mo ago
  It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that everything was produced locally - except many things were breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many). I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.
  - mantas 11mo ago
    Coming from ex-USSR, I can assure you that shortages and shitty quality was not because of closed garden. But because of politics (and corruption) first. And lack of meritocratic natural selection. Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient for some reason.
    - trinix912 11mo ago
      Yugoslavia didn't have centralized planning for products, one could even argue it had a meritocratic natural selection (sort of) and there still were shortages. Maybe the EU as a whole could pull off being 'fully independent' but it would require way more collaboration between countries than what we currently have.
      - mantas 11mo ago
        And, compared to USSR, Yugos production was much higher quality and shortages were much smaller. EU could become fully independent by simply taxing imports. Designated collaboration between countries would just lead to inefficient central planning style stuff. Which is how many trans-Europe projects died
  - osener 11mo ago
    I knew plenty of office workers managing just fine using OpenOffice 10-15 years ago. Today people are much more reliant on real-time collaboration, polished cloud and mobile experiences. Fractionalized open source software has a harder time competing with this than file based boxed software workflows of the past.
    - boznz 11mo ago
      Agree, Personally I consider these newer systems a curse as far as productivity goes, using a simple email/open-office combination never caused any issues with clients or suppliers in the last 20 years.
- anonzzzies 11mo ago
  The problem is , there are very few Europeans or EUans. There are French and Germans and Spanish etc; they all want their country first and sure open markets but their country first. That is how they vote (certainly these days). Most people do not feel EU unfortunately. Language is one thing: it is getting better but having language not unified (English, Spanish, Mandarin; pick one) is a massive and real issue keeping people's minds and efforts local instead of, at least EU wide. It is slowly getting better but the EU should made easier accessible and far higher funds for pan EU projects. Currently it is a serious pain to get access to EU funds and many just get eaten by the few massive consultancy corps who have dedicated teams going for any funding and tender in any locality and language.
  - lpcvoid 11mo ago
    Well written. I hope one day the united states of europe is a real political entity, burying the stupidity that is fragmented national interests.
    - systemtest 11mo ago
      As a EU citizen that moved to a different EU country: Yes please! I constantly need a VPN as some services from my old country are geo-blocked. And when I forget to disable the VPN to my old country I can't visit certain sites from my current country. I need two phone numbers as some services require a phone number from the country they operate out of. I'm talking banking, classifieds, insurance, municipal. I can't use certain apps from my current country because I have to switch my account country but that disables apps from my old country. And the best part, I can't vote for the national elections in my current country. Only for those in my old country. And it will be like that for the rest of my life. An example: I had to enable VPN to see the election results of my old country, the one I am eligible to vote in. Please unify the EU so I don't have to deal with all of this.
      - econ 11mo ago
        Having people vote who don't live in the country has always struck me as weird. If you are some place else for say a year or even 10 years it seems a reasonable topic for debate but longer?? Never pay taxes either???
YC398739847 11mo ago
EU politicians are just too dependent on keeping the status quo of the last decade. The status quo is how they got to their position so they have no incentive to change anything (Starmer, Merz, Marcon, Von der Lyen. Yuck). By the time they finally get the shove they need to rapidly decouple, e.g. when America invades The Hague* to rescue Netanyahu from war crimes charges, it will be when they're already on the edge of the proverbial cliff. *: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
- ta20240528 11mo ago
  The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan. Now they are invading continental Europe? As I said, still licking the car battery.
  - YC9834689 11mo ago
    Most European countries barely have a standing military to defend themselves, they're completely dependent on the USA for defense through NATO. And their leadership is so docile and complacent that I can't see them being able to muster up a strong resistance to any incursion, most likely if there was an actual invasion of The Hague they would let America do what they need to and try to return back to business as usual as quickly as possible. Again, they're not the types to think beyond the status quo.
    - mcv 11mo ago
      The EU put together has the second largest military in the world. > And their leadership is so docile and complacent That is the real issue.
    - ta20240528 11mo ago
      "Most European countries … are completely dependent on the USA for defense" Only if invaded by Russia and possibly China. And even then only the little peripheral ones. UK, Germany, and France could handle Russia - up to and including nukes. For any conceivable military or paramilitary invasion from the rest of world, Europe will do just fine. And sadly (an a bit off topic) , Europe — well Denmark at least — is most likely to face an military invasion from the USA.
graemep 11mo ago
Europe is not a political entity or an organisation. Who exactly will do it? The EU, some EU country, Russia, the UK, Switzerland, some cooperative agreement...?
- trinix912 11mo ago
  We're talking about running a few mail server, network shares, and an office suite (LibreOffice if you want). Any university's in-house IT department should be able to pull that off, and it's exactly what many did for a very long time.
  - rorylawless 11mo ago
    If Universities are anything like other large public/public-adjacent organizations, the bulk of the in-house IT department was long since replaced by Microsoft resellers posing as IT. It’s insidious.
    - freehorse 11mo ago
      Not all universities in Europe are like this, but some are 100% like this. But if there was a larger political directive towards a more autonomous solution, it would eventually work, I think.
      - graemep 11mo ago
        Can universities be given political directives like that in most European countries? In the UK they are usually (entirely?) independent, are non-profits and registered charities. They get government funding for both (British resident) students and research so the government has leverage but would have to use that to incentivise them. I imagine at least some other European countries are much the same. An even trickier question if you are interested in digital sovereignty is how to get the private sector to do the same. Running everything on AWS and requiring a mobile app to do anything seems to be almost instinctive for many organisations.
graemep 11mo ago
China is bigger, and a lot more ambitious, and is willing to put resources into it. European countries (except maybe Russia!), in the EU and outside, are very complacent.
- trinix912 11mo ago
  It's not as much about complacency as it is about the lack of funding and resources. We're talking about countries with government budgets as low as 20 billion USD. Looking at common election promises, people here would rather see that money spent on non-profit housing, healthcare, infrastructure, than some ambitious AI or tech project that they likely wouldn't directly benefit from - at least compared to the things mentioned before - so there's little money left for "developing our own MS Office / LLM / Google". Whereas China not only has a much bigger budget than individual EU countries, but also central planning on a large scale, so they can just "force" things be done, no matter whether people like it or not. China giving 0.01% for such projects is way more money than a small EU country giving the same %. And it's not like they'll vote the party out for a failed project (which happens in EU countries quite often).
  - canyp 11mo ago
    Does China actually "force" things to be done? As far as I can tell, in the realm of technology at least, the government mostly just sets direction and then lets private capital do its thing, albeit without letting power concentrate in a way that subverts government.
    - anonzzzies 11mo ago
      When they want something to be done, it just gets done. I guess that is the point; I was working in China when one year there were 0 electric scooters; the next year, only. Gas scooters were forbidden overnight basically and that was that. Try doing that over here...
      - canyp 11mo ago

throwawaysleep 11mo ago

Push has come to shove and has been shoving for nearly a decade. Europeans continue to be incapable. As a Canadian I wish they were not, but they are.

vladms 11mo ago
It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that everything was produced locally - except many things were breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many). I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.
- mantas 11mo ago
  Coming from ex-USSR, I can assure you that shortages and shitty quality was not because of closed garden. But because of politics (and corruption) first. And lack of meritocratic natural selection. Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient for some reason.
  - trinix912 11mo ago
    Yugoslavia didn't have centralized planning for products, one could even argue it had a meritocratic natural selection (sort of) and there still were shortages. Maybe the EU as a whole could pull off being 'fully independent' but it would require way more collaboration between countries than what we currently have.
    - mantas 11mo ago
      And, compared to USSR, Yugos production was much higher quality and shortages were much smaller. EU could become fully independent by simply taxing imports. Designated collaboration between countries would just lead to inefficient central planning style stuff. Which is how many trans-Europe projects died
- osener 11mo ago
  I knew plenty of office workers managing just fine using OpenOffice 10-15 years ago. Today people are much more reliant on real-time collaboration, polished cloud and mobile experiences. Fractionalized open source software has a harder time competing with this than file based boxed software workflows of the past.
  - boznz 11mo ago
    Agree, Personally I consider these newer systems a curse as far as productivity goes, using a simple email/open-office combination never caused any issues with clients or suppliers in the last 20 years.
anonzzzies 11mo ago
The problem is , there are very few Europeans or EUans. There are French and Germans and Spanish etc; they all want their country first and sure open markets but their country first. That is how they vote (certainly these days). Most people do not feel EU unfortunately. Language is one thing: it is getting better but having language not unified (English, Spanish, Mandarin; pick one) is a massive and real issue keeping people's minds and efforts local instead of, at least EU wide. It is slowly getting better but the EU should made easier accessible and far higher funds for pan EU projects. Currently it is a serious pain to get access to EU funds and many just get eaten by the few massive consultancy corps who have dedicated teams going for any funding and tender in any locality and language.
- lpcvoid 11mo ago
  Well written. I hope one day the united states of europe is a real political entity, burying the stupidity that is fragmented national interests.
  - systemtest 11mo ago
    As a EU citizen that moved to a different EU country: Yes please! I constantly need a VPN as some services from my old country are geo-blocked. And when I forget to disable the VPN to my old country I can't visit certain sites from my current country. I need two phone numbers as some services require a phone number from the country they operate out of. I'm talking banking, classifieds, insurance, municipal. I can't use certain apps from my current country because I have to switch my account country but that disables apps from my old country. And the best part, I can't vote for the national elections in my current country. Only for those in my old country. And it will be like that for the rest of my life. An example: I had to enable VPN to see the election results of my old country, the one I am eligible to vote in. Please unify the EU so I don't have to deal with all of this.
    - econ 11mo ago
      Having people vote who don't live in the country has always struck me as weird. If you are some place else for say a year or even 10 years it seems a reasonable topic for debate but longer?? Never pay taxes either???

YC398739847 11mo ago

EU politicians are just too dependent on keeping the status quo of the last decade. The status quo is how they got to their position so they have no incentive to change anything (Starmer, Merz, Marcon, Von der Lyen. Yuck). By the time they finally get the shove they need to rapidly decouple, e.g. when America invades The Hague* to rescue Netanyahu from war crimes charges, it will be when they're already on the edge of the proverbial cliff. *: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...

ta20240528 11mo ago
The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan. Now they are invading continental Europe? As I said, still licking the car battery.
- YC9834689 11mo ago
  Most European countries barely have a standing military to defend themselves, they're completely dependent on the USA for defense through NATO. And their leadership is so docile and complacent that I can't see them being able to muster up a strong resistance to any incursion, most likely if there was an actual invasion of The Hague they would let America do what they need to and try to return back to business as usual as quickly as possible. Again, they're not the types to think beyond the status quo.
  - mcv 11mo ago
    The EU put together has the second largest military in the world. > And their leadership is so docile and complacent That is the real issue.
  - ta20240528 11mo ago
    "Most European countries … are completely dependent on the USA for defense" Only if invaded by Russia and possibly China. And even then only the little peripheral ones. UK, Germany, and France could handle Russia - up to and including nukes. For any conceivable military or paramilitary invasion from the rest of world, Europe will do just fine. And sadly (an a bit off topic) , Europe — well Denmark at least — is most likely to face an military invasion from the USA.

graemep 11mo ago

Europe is not a political entity or an organisation. Who exactly will do it? The EU, some EU country, Russia, the UK, Switzerland, some cooperative agreement...?

trinix912 11mo ago
We're talking about running a few mail server, network shares, and an office suite (LibreOffice if you want). Any university's in-house IT department should be able to pull that off, and it's exactly what many did for a very long time.
- rorylawless 11mo ago
  If Universities are anything like other large public/public-adjacent organizations, the bulk of the in-house IT department was long since replaced by Microsoft resellers posing as IT. It’s insidious.
  - freehorse 11mo ago
    Not all universities in Europe are like this, but some are 100% like this. But if there was a larger political directive towards a more autonomous solution, it would eventually work, I think.
    - graemep 11mo ago
      Can universities be given political directives like that in most European countries? In the UK they are usually (entirely?) independent, are non-profits and registered charities. They get government funding for both (British resident) students and research so the government has leverage but would have to use that to incentivise them. I imagine at least some other European countries are much the same. An even trickier question if you are interested in digital sovereignty is how to get the private sector to do the same. Running everything on AWS and requiring a mobile app to do anything seems to be almost instinctive for many organisations.

graemep 11mo ago

China is bigger, and a lot more ambitious, and is willing to put resources into it. European countries (except maybe Russia!), in the EU and outside, are very complacent.

trinix912 11mo ago
It's not as much about complacency as it is about the lack of funding and resources. We're talking about countries with government budgets as low as 20 billion USD. Looking at common election promises, people here would rather see that money spent on non-profit housing, healthcare, infrastructure, than some ambitious AI or tech project that they likely wouldn't directly benefit from - at least compared to the things mentioned before - so there's little money left for "developing our own MS Office / LLM / Google". Whereas China not only has a much bigger budget than individual EU countries, but also central planning on a large scale, so they can just "force" things be done, no matter whether people like it or not. China giving 0.01% for such projects is way more money than a small EU country giving the same %. And it's not like they'll vote the party out for a failed project (which happens in EU countries quite often).
- canyp 11mo ago
  Does China actually "force" things to be done? As far as I can tell, in the realm of technology at least, the government mostly just sets direction and then lets private capital do its thing, albeit without letting power concentrate in a way that subverts government.
  - anonzzzies 11mo ago
    When they want something to be done, it just gets done. I guess that is the point; I was working in China when one year there were 0 electric scooters; the next year, only. Gas scooters were forbidden overnight basically and that was that. Try doing that over here...
    - canyp 11mo ago